~ Exploring the human-canine bond

Longing for Country Living!

Please bear with me while I vent. I just moved inside after trying to work out in my yard. As it is, I have a double fence set up – one on the periphery of my tiny yard space, and a second one inside the yard around the patio. The idea is to put a buffer zone between my dogs and the neighbourhood kids.

My dogs are never outside without me at least being in the kitchen with the back door propped open. But even then I have to play constant defence for my dogs. The kids are obsessed with them and often flock in groups of 6-10, clamouring around my fence, reaching over to pet the dogs. Two days ago one little girl was bent right over the fence with her arms wrapped around Ross’s head, which she was pulling up towards her, and asking why he was growling. DUH!

Today the sun finally came out after a long, dreary week, and I decided to work out on the patio. When the weather is nice, the patio pretty much becomes my home. In the past, this has worked very well. However I live in a high density and high turn-over townhouse complex, and the local demographic changes considerably from year to year. This year, it seems, we have a disproportionate number of non-school age kids in the area. This includes my (very nice) new neighbours who moved in next door with their toddler and ever-crying baby, and use their yard all the time. In fact, whenever the baby cries they step outside and walk up and down along the (my) fence trying to get him to stop.

Right now there is a gang of a half dozen screeching children playing about 40 feet from my patio, and my neighbour is operating a power saw 6 feet from where I was trying to work.

I am so not going to miss this when I move!!

Speaking of which, I may have found a very good housing option for me and the crew. I am going to see the place this weekend, but I have already spoken at length to the woman who currently lives there and it sounds wonderful. I’ve known her for about a year now and have always found her to be extremely pleasant and interesting. She is even more focused on holistic living and healthy food than I am (she is an organic farmer, who I have been buying a lot of produce from this past year). Her house is not on the farm where she grows her food, but a few minutes drive away. So out of the city, but not quite on a farm. Apparently the neighbourhood is residential but small and quiet, with a lot of property around the house. Oh, and it’s walking distance to a very nice beach.

It sounds really promising!!

I will know more after I’ve gone to see the house. I expect that will be perfect, but I need to make sure the area is safe to let my cats out, and that there is somewhere close to let the dogs run off-leash. My crew is used to off-leash running every day for at least 45 minutes (ideally much more than that) so this is very important. That said, I have always been able to find a place to run the dogs, even when I lived in the hearts of Houston, Chicago, Vancouver or Boston. So hopefully I can find a good spot in rural Ontario.

OK, the saw was just turned off, so back to work now that I can finally hear myself think! Wait… too late, the baby just started crying again…

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2 thoughts on “Longing for Country Living!”

Good Luck! The place sounds great. Curious about where you ran your dogs in Boston. I grew up there but haven’t lived there in a very long time. I had a client who moved from there and said dogs were allowed leash free in the parks early in the mornings which I thought was pretty cool. In NJ, off leash is forbidden except in dog parks (which is why they are so crowded and out of control and I would never bring my dogs there.) Hopefully the new place will work out and there will be fewer kids.

I took the dogs to the Medford Felds, in the north of Boston. This was about 6 years ago, but at the time no one seemed to mind off-leash dogs. The felds are a huge forested area with a number of small lakes that are used as water reservoirs for the city. As long as you don’t let the dogs go into the lakes (a bit of a trick), it was ok to let them run. I lived about a 5 minuted drive from one end of the felds and walked there nearly every day. It was almost as nice to walk in as the Endowment Lands around UBC in Vancouver.

I find that most universities have nice property around them and typically they don’t have leash laws. Or at least they don’t have anyone patrolling and enforcing leash laws. Two nights ago I was confronted by the local police for having the dogs off-leash, however they couldn’t do anything about it because I was on campus property, right where it borders public lands. I actually never cross to the public part, for this very reason, but they had suspected me of doing so. Thank goodness they didn’t have jurisdiction on campus – had I been a hundred feet east, I would have been hit with a $225 fine PER DOG and I had all four dogs with me!!!